Friday, July 21, 2017

Sea of Slaughter

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Farley Mowat (1921–2014) was a famous Canadian nature writer,
a fire-breathing critic of modernity’s war on wildness.He spent much of his life close to the Gulf
of St. Lawrence and the Atlantic, and was an avid outdoorsman.By 1975, he and his wife were becoming acutely
aware of the sharp decline of wildlife during their own lifetimes.

Mowat chatted with 90-year olds who confirmed his suspicions,
and revealed even more tragedies.Then
he began researching historical documents, and his mind snapped.Early European visitors were astonished by
the abundance of wildlife in North America, something long gone in the Old
World.To them, the animals appeared to
be infinite in number, impossible for humans to diminish, ever!

At this point, spirits of the ancestors gave him the heart-wrenching
task of writing the mother of all horror stories.His book, Sea
of Slaughter, focused on the last 500 years in a coastal region
spanning from Labrador to Cape Cod.The
book has five parts: birds, land mammals, fish, whales, and fin feet (seals,
walrus).

For thousands of years, Native Americans hunted for
subsistence, taking only what they needed to survive.Europeans were strikingly different.They suffered from brain worms that inflamed a
maniacal obsession with wealth and status.They were bewitched by an insatiable greed that was impossible to
satisfy — they could never have enough.Today,
scientists refer to this devastating, highly contagious mental illness as get-rich-quick
fever — the villain of this story.

In 1534, Jacques Cartier sailed by the Isle of Birds, a
rookery for auks (northern penguins).He
wrote, “This island is so exceedingly full of birds that all the ships of
France might load a cargo of them without anyone noticing that any had been
removed.”Auks were large, flightless, fat,
and laid eggs in accessible locations (not cliff side nests).Vast numbers were clobbered, salted, and
loaded on ships.Others were chopped
into fish bait.Many were boiled in
large cauldrons to extract the oil from their body fat.In Europe, it had taken over a thousand years
to exterminate the auks; in the New World, advanced technology got the job done
in just 300 years.The last two died in
1844.

Prior to the emergence of the petroleum industry in the late
nineteenth century, civilization acquired large amounts of oil from wildlife —
seabirds, whales, walrus, seals, porpoises, and fish.An adult polar bear killed in autumn provided
lots of meat, a valuable pelt, and twelve gallons (45 l) of good oil.Animal oil was used for lamp fuel,
lubrication, cooking oil, soap, cosmetics, margarine, and leather processing.

There are a number of repeating patterns in the book.The hunger for money was the heart of the
monster.Nothing else really
mattered.If there were just ten whales
left in the world, and they were worth money, the hunters would not hesitate to
kill them all.God made animals for us
to obliterate.Whenever possible, wildlife
massacres were done on an industrial scale — kill as many as possible, as fast
as possible.

Conservation was an obscene, profit killing, four-letter
word.When there were fewer cod, whales,
or seals, the value of each corpse increased.So, the industry got more and bigger boats, used the latest technology,
and raced to kill as many as possible, before competitors found them.Rules, regulations, and prohibitions were
always issued far too late to matter, and they usually included enough
loopholes to make them meaningless.The
slaughter industry ignored them, and bureaucrats winked and looked the other
way.

Five hundred years ago, cod grew to seven feet long (2.1 m),
and weighed up to 200 pounds (91 kg).An
observer noted, “Cods are so thick by the shore that we hardly have been able
to row a boat through them.”Today the
average cod is 6 pounds.For many years,
they were killed in staggering numbers.By 1968, the cod fishery was rubbished.It has not recovered, because fish mining has also depleted small fish,
the cod’s basic food.

Nobody ever confesses to overfishing or overhunting.What happened to the cod?Obviously, they moved somewhere else, we
don’t know where.Efforts are made to find
them.When searches failed, it was time
to seek and destroy scapegoats: whales, porpoises, loons, otters, cormorants,
and many others.

In 1850, loons lived in nearly every lake and large pond in
the northeast, from Virginia to the high arctic.Hunters rarely ate them, but they were
excellent flying targets for gun geeks.When folks noticed salmon and trout numbers declining, it was time to
look for loon nests and smash their eggs.Cormorants got the same treatment.Their rookeries were invaded, and all eggs and chicks destroyed.Sometimes they sprayed the eggs with
kerosene, to kill the embryos.Birds
continued sitting on lifeless eggs, instead of laying new eggs.

Big game hunting was a profitable industry, catering to
<bleepity-bleeps> who found killing to be thrilling.It generated the shiny coins that make men
crazy.What could be more fun than
cruising around shooting beluga whales?In the old days, many beaches were jam-packed with walrus that could
grow to 14 feet long (4.2 m), and weigh up to 3,000 pounds (1,360 kg).Rich lads enjoyed walrus hunting
competitions.One guy, in three weeks, killed
84 bulls, 20 cows, and a number of youngsters, not counting those that died
unseen after being wounded.

Mature whales and walrus had no natural predators, so they
never evolved defensive aspects or strategies.They didn’t need to be aggressive or speedy.They were often curious and friendly.Hunters preferred to kill black right whales.Their bodies had a layer of blubber up to 20
inches (51 cm) thick, containing up to 3,500 gallons (12,250 l) of oil.Abundant blubber meant that the dead ones
floated.Other species sank when killed,
and were lost.With regard to all whale
species, it was common for the number of lost carcasses (sinkers) to exceed the
number landed and butchered.Extreme
waste didn’t matter as long as the carcasses landed were profitable.

Anyway, Sea
of Slaughter is over 400 pages of back-to-back horror stories with
no rest stops. The book is painful, disgusting,
and illuminating — a mind-bending experience. Reading it puts you into an altered state of
consciousness, an otherworldly trance state.Our brains aren’t designed to process flash floods of stupidity.

Many readers will be shocked to see the degree to which screw
brained beliefs can turn ordinary people into mindless monsters — an important
concept for folks trying to understand the world.Some readers may be tempted to dismiss the foolish
destruction as an aspect of the bad old days, when we didn’t know any better.Readers having a larger collection of working
brain cells will realize that the greed is still with us, in a multitude of new
forms, and it’s destroying more than ever before — a vital idea to grasp.

It’s much easier for us to acknowledge horrors that happened
in the past, rather than the horrors our shopping is causing today.History can be powerful medicine when it is
taught by competent elders, instead of the usual cheerleaders for wealth, empire,
progress, and human supremacy.Mowat was
an excellent wordsmith, and a passionate storyteller.You will never forget this one.

Postscript.In 1985, following
the publication of Sea
of Slaughter, Mowat was scheduled to do a book tour in the U.S.Shortly after boarding his plane in Toronto,
customs officials escorted him back off.He learned that he was forever forbidden to travel to the land of
freedom — and they wouldn’t tell him why.This was the Reagan era, and Mowat had pissed off many conservatives.Banishment inspired him to write a smart-assed
new book, My Discovery
of America.